Annotate.co User Guide
Welcome to your Annotate.co User Guide! Annotate.co is the latest version of Annotate.com, a platorm for sharing, editing, and annotating PDFs. This page will help you understand the essential tools of Annotate.co, what you can do with those tools, and why you might want to use them in the context of the Digital Humanities. Screen Shot 2015-11-25 at 11.40.02 PM.png Screen Shot 2015-11-25 at 10.55.12 PM.png Screen Shot 2015-11-25 at 11.28.19 PM.png Screen Shot 2015-11-25 at 11.29.05 PM.png Ready to make your life of editing, annotating, and researching easier? Get started with Annotate.co below! Getting Started To start a free account... #Go to Annotate.co #Enter the desired information OR sign in with Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn #Once you have your account set up, you're ready to start annotating! 'Uploading Documents ' Annotate.co uses workspaces to help you organize your documents. Within these workspaces (you are given two with the free version), you can upload 20 MB of documents, which in turn can be organized into folders within the workspaces. To get started, all you need to do is create a workspace! # After you create the your free account, click on the icon to the left to create, name, and get started in your new workspace. #One you create your workspace, you can access it anytime on any computer (that's the beauty of the cloud!). Any of your workspaces will appear after login. A simple double click on the desired workspace will get you started. #Opening your workspace will bring you to its Documents tab. This is super convenient because it's the tab that will get you inside your documents to start working, and probably the one you will use the most. #Other tabs that live on this task bar are Lastest Changes, Notes, Search, and Admin. 'Basic Views ' *Latest Changes lets you view your work and the work of other users in the workspace in a news feed-like presentation. *The Notes tab displays all the in-text notes in the workspace from all users. *The Search tab allows you to search throughout all of your workspaces for anything written in notes (it is automatically encoded as you write) as well as the PDF text. (Psst... you may want to put your PDF through Optical Character Recognition software to make its text readable, but it's quick, easy, AND free!) *The Admin tab allows you to add or delete users as well as grant admininstrator roles. Keep in mind that most of this can be accessed from the defualt Documents tab. The other tabs will simply get you to those places quickly from any point of the Documents view. Annotating Documents Annotate.co makes all of your edits public to any other users or administrators within the workspace. The interface makes marking up a PDF as easy as it could be. Once you are logged in, simply navigate to the documents you wish to work on and double click. From there, the interface's icons are pretty self explanatory, and the site's ability to undo or delete things you create makes playing around an ideal way to learn the software. However, there are some key tools that you can familiarize yourself with below. The toolbar on the top of your documents holds a variety of useful tools, including... *Notes, both type written and freehand, which can be arranged manually or by preference *Page views, including side-by-side and page rotations *Tags for categorization and easy searches *Share and Export abilities *Filters *Option to print *Help *And more! 'Notes ' The Notes feature allows you to comment on text, handwritten annotations or other peoples' notes. #Simply click and drag to highlight a text or image. #This will automatically open the Note dialogue box. *From the dialogue box, write notes, add tags that make your note searchable *In the "To" dropdown menu in the uper left corner of the Note dialogue box, you can choose who has access to you note out of the available users *The ability to link to your note to other notes or parts of the text is in the bottom left corner of the dialogue box *Don't forget that you can easily view all notes from the Notes tab on the toolbar To reply to the notes of others, simly select the note and hit reply. This will open a dialogue box that allows you to chat back and forth, right alongside the text! 'Freehand Drawing' The Freehand tool located on the toolbar allows you to draw inside the text. Once selected, your mouse will act as the pen and you are free to annotate away! Anything you annotate with the Freehand tool can also be commented on with the Notes feature, tagged for categorization, or linked to as well. Sharing There are several options for sharing your annotated documents. #The Share option from the toolbar is the easiest way to invite other people into your document. Clicking Share will give you the option to send an invite via email, assign either a user or administrator role, as well as add a personal message that will appear in the email. #From the Notes tab, you can export any work you've done, which will be downloaded to your computer. This allows you to share your work with people who are not active users in your workspace. Simply select the work you wish to export and use the Export button in the top center of the Notes view. This also gives you the option to export either your highlited text OR any tags you have created within the workspace. Getting to Work Congratulations! You now know the basics of Annotate.co and are ready to get started annotating, collaborating, and sharing your work! While the software holds many features, many are at your fingertips, and you won't have to go searching for tools because they come to you! For example, creating a note or selecting an existing one will give you all the tools you need, right inside the dialogue box. Linking, tagging, sharing, and replying are all within the box you just made appear by a simple click. Similarly, everything you need is at the top of your document on the toolbar, and if you ever get stuck, the Help tab is also located on this toolbar. The only other thing you'll need to start using Annotate.co is a document and a fellow annotator! Category:Digital humanities Category:Digital Annotation